In her bathroom, he'd hurled a couple of bottles against the wall, but all but one were plastic and didn't break. I cleaned up the one broken bottle, and got rid of the shards of glass so she wouldn't cut herself. I found her Lady Remington that he'd switched on and then hurled to the floor, and wasn't surprised to discover that it no longer worked. The pink plastic case was cracked, and when I moved the switch nothing happened. I laid it in the wastebasket, then changed my mind, wrapped it in a paper towel, and tucked it away in a jacket pocket.

I got the place as neat as I could, short of scrubbing the floors on my hands and knees, and then I went in for a last look at her. It was the closest I'd been to a naked woman in longer than I cared to remember, and all I felt was sad.

I went to the door, opened it. Then I sighed heavily and returned to the bedroom for one final stab at chivalry. It didn't take long, maybe five minutes, after which I let myself out of Barbara Creeley's apartment, picked her locks shut, and went home.

Ten

If Crandall Oaktree Mapes is a shitheel-"

"Crandall Rountree Mapes."

"Whatever. If he's a shitheel just for taking Marty's girlfriend away from him, Bern, what does that make this guy?"

"There must be a word," I said, "but I can't think of it."

"Well, for openers," Carolyn said, "I'd have to say he's a prick. You never got a look at him?"

"For all the time he was there, I was under the bed. All I got a look at were the dust bunnies."

"It's good you didn't sneeze."

"It is," I agreed. "It's good I didn't even think about sneezing, because it was unpleasant enough without having that to worry about. But no, I never got a look at him. I decided he was six-four with a washboard stomach and shoulders out to here, but that was my imagination. All I really know is he had a deep voice."

"I know women with deep voices, Bern. You can't tell too much from a deep voice."

It was Thursday, a few minutes after noon, and we were having lunch at my bookstore. Carolyn had gone clear over to the Second Avenue Deli for sandwiches piled high with the best corned beef and pastrami and tongue in town. What, I'd asked her, was the occasion, and she'd replied that there was no occasion beyond the fact that she'd spent much of the previous night dreaming about delicatessen.

"I missed dinner," she said. "I was on the computer for hours, browsing the listings on Date-a-Dyke, and I figured instead of wasting time eating I'd go over to the Cubby Hole and snack on the bar food. So I went to bed with nothing in my stomach but a couple handfuls of Beer Nuts, and I had this endless dream where they kept making my sandwich but never got around to bringing it to the table. And by the time I woke up I knew just what we were gonna have for lunch today. It's good, isn't it?"

We were working on the sandwiches and sipping our Cel-Ray tonic, and it turned out to be just what I wanted, even if I hadn't had a dream to tell me so. Corned beef is Raffles's favorite thing in all the world, and Carolyn had brought a little extra and slipped it into his food dish, where he was at once eating it and talking to it, a ritual he goes through with kosher corned beef and nothing else. Siamese talk to their food occasionally, or so Carolyn tells me, but Raffles is a tailless tabby, allegedly a Manx but lacking the characteristic body shape and rabbity gait of the typical Manx. His only Manx trait, really, is the tail he doesn't have, and I've often suspected that he's a Manx manqué, but I could be wrong about that. He's certainly not Siamese, but he sounded like one when he had corned beef in his dish, so that's how you might have pictured him if you'd been hiding under the bed, with nothing to go by but his voice.

Carolyn said, "How do you figure a guy like that, anyway? I mean, it goes without saying that he hates women, but why would he want her unconscious?"

"I don't know. Maybe conscious partners tend to give him bad reviews."

"I guess Barbara Creeley couldn't tell him he was a lousy lover, since she didn't have a clue what was going on. Still, you'd think he'd want someone capable of responding. Maybe his first girlfriend was English."

"I suppose it's possible."

She put down her sandwich. "That was a joke, Bern. You know the old one about the Frenchman who finds a girl on the beach and starts making love to her?"

"I know the joke."

"Someone comes along and tells him she's dead and he's horrified. 'Soccer blew,' he said. 'I thought she was English!' "

"I know the joke. Soccer blew, huh?"

"That's what they say. Frenchmen, they say it all the time. Soccer blew. Don't ask me what it means."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

" Bern? That was pretty decent of you, straightening up before you left. You must have been anxious to get out of there."

"Well, I felt sorry for her. I wanted to do something."

"It sounds as though you did everything but wash the windows."

I shook my head. "All I did was straighten up a few things. I was going to put her clothes away, but I figured I'd just put them in the wrong place. Besides, there was no way to keep her from knowing she'd been out of it when she got home, or that she'd had sex. But I couldn't leave her stuff in a heap on the floor, so I folded her things and put them on a chair."

"And put the stuff in her purse, and so on. Bern, do you suppose he left her any souvenirs?"

"Souvenirs?"

"Like a pregnancy she wasn't counting on, or an STD."

"Oh," I said. "I'd say probably not. He used a condom."

"Really? You wouldn't figure him to be that considerate, would you?"

"I think he was considering himself," I said, "and practicing safe sex more for his own benefit than for hers."

"And maybe to keep from leaving evidence."

"Evidence?"

"You know, DNA. She could go to the police and they'd take a swab and be able to identify him if they ever caught him. From his DNA."

"If he was concerned about that," I said, "he'd probably have taken the condom away with him."

"He left it there?"

"On the floor."

"Yuck. What did you do?"

"I got rid of it."

"How?"

"I picked it up and flushed it down the toilet."

"You touched it? Double yuck. How could you even do that, Bern?"

"I was wearing gloves."

"Oh, right."

"And I couldn't just leave it where I found it."

"No, of course not. You know something, Bern? Barbara Creeley was lucky you were there."

"Oh, absolutely," I said. "It was her lucky night all around."

"I mean it, Bern. If you hadn't been there, that prick would have taken her watch and her charm bracelet and her diamond earrings."

"Instead, I took them."

"But you put them back, Bern."

"Well, I felt sorry for her. An unprincipled son of a bitch slipped a drug into her drink and brought her home and raped her, and now I was adding insult to injury by stealing her stuff."

"Except you got there first."

"Even so. I'd already picked up the jewelry he left behind and put it away, and I figured if I put the good stuff back, she might not even know she'd been robbed. There were a few things missing, but what kind of moron would snatch a class ring and pass up a bracelet dripping with gold coins?"

"She'll just think she must have misplaced the ring."

"If I could manage to find out who he was," I said, "I'd pay him a visit one of these nights and get her ring back for her."

"Unless he's sold it by then."

"Oh, he won't sell it. He won't know where to go with it, and anyway he'll want to keep it for a souvenir. Something to remember her by, the son of a bitch."

"That'd be neat, if you could steal it back. How would you get it to her? Just drop it in the mail?"